Künstler - - Stift Admont
Künstler - - Stift Admont
Künstler - - Stift Admont
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August Klett<br />
*Heilbronn 1866–1928, Weinsberg Clinic<br />
Pseudonym from Prinzhorn: “August Klotz”<br />
no image available<br />
The son of a hot-tempered Heilbronn merchant, Klett had a difficult youth. After<br />
completing secondary school and until a one-year merchant apprenticeship and<br />
military service, Klett worked for his father’s colonial goods agency abroad<br />
(Antwerp, Brussels, London) and then as a wine and champagne salesman.<br />
He was a freemason, is purported to have had numerous romantic interludes with<br />
women and went to wine tastings with duchesses.<br />
After a failed love affair and severe influenza, his suffered from increased<br />
depression, feelings of guilt and necrophobia, causing him to cut himself in the<br />
stomach during a hallucination. He was admitted to the Göppingen Clinic in<br />
1903, feeling as though he was being followed and suffering the crucifixion as<br />
"Christ".<br />
He was transferred to Weinsberg in 1905, “unimproved”. Here, he warded off<br />
the devils and deaths heads that he saw on the wallpaper with freemason symbols<br />
made from fat. He invented a “colour alphabet” (a=red, et cetera) and a<br />
cabalistic combined number-colour-letter system.<br />
He was extraordinarily productive as a word and visual artist. He learned his<br />
large-scale, high-contrast painting style from poster art. He poured humour into<br />
the fireworks of his visual and linguistic inspirations and configurations,<br />
unsystematically yet calculatedly at the same time.<br />
Everyday life in the clinic, things remembered, business occasions, conversations,<br />
education theory and sexual desires were disassembled, recombined and tightly<br />
linked. Normative image and linguistic characters are rendered unrecognisable: a<br />
rhetoric of madness, which was called, perplexedly and disrespectfully, "language<br />
salad", "disjointed" or "futuristic".<br />
The silver-tongued strategy of the “sprachlöchersterne” remained silent regarding<br />
real traumas.<br />
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